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Friday, August 10, 2012

Is your resume updated?

Your resume is the first step towards opening the door of communication with your dream employer. This is reason enough to bid adieu to your standard and ‘Times New Roman' neatly formatted resume, and start afresh.

By Unmesh Pawar, senior VP - HR, Accenture India BPO

Keep it brief:

Companies receive plenty of resumes on a daily basis, all of them a few pages long. Keeping it short and crisp is the key. However, if you have plenty of relevant work experience, do not compromise and compress everything into a page. A two-page resume is also acceptable;

Avoid clutter:

Using bullet points makes your resume look neater and a lot easier to comprehend than a chunk of words squeezed in a paragraph;

Go straight to the point:

The interviewer does not need to know about every project you worked on or seminar you attended. That being said, make sure you do not leave out critical learning/training experiences you may have had;

Watch out for errors:

Employers typically spend a few seconds reading a resume, and a single typo can send it straight to the ‘discard pile'. Always, ensure to review your resume;

Make it unique:

Add your personal touch and design style to make it stand out. The use of a unique layout, choice of colours, fonts, etc enhances your resume;

Bring alive your personality:

Besides highlighting your accomplishments, elaborate a little on how you performed in your previous jobs and what you achieved. The use of action verbs catches the recruiter's attention. Words like ‘directed', ‘developed', and ‘incorporated' are some examples.